Viet Thanh Nguyen

Your fellow citizens are proud of you, and so is your commander-in-chief.

Because of your service and sacrifice, we took the fight to Al-Qaeda, and we brought Osama bin Laden to justice.

I think that

We live in countries that privilege and honor soldiers and look down on refugees because refugees remind us of how close we ourselves could be to those circumstances if for some unfortunate reason we happen to fall victim to war or to climate catastrophe or things like this.

I think that if we shifted our perspective from the view of great men and soldiers and battles and so forth to the experience of refugees, what we would realize is that war inevitably kills civilians and that war also inevitably produces refugees.

War inevitably affects civilians.

War is this horrible, daily, unforgiving grind for millions and millions of people who do not ask for war and whose lives are completely upended by war and who will never receive any kind of glory or recognition for what they have been through.

And so the solution to this kind of inequity is not simply to say, tell your own story, which is true.

That's why when I wrote a novel, the solution is also to say,

you actually have to transform society so that more people have the opportunity to tell their stories.

These two things are inseparable.

Tell your story and transform the society so that more people have the opportunity to tell their stories.

Another way of thinking about this is that when my novel, The Sympathizer, got published and became successful, some people said, oh, Viet's the voice for the voiceless.

And I thought that's not a compliment because all that really indicates is that people just want to hear from one voice.

When in fact, there's thousands of voices and a happy forgetting would be achieved not by having Viet be the voice for the voiceless and having his one novel out there.

A happy forgetting would be achieved when we've abolished the conditions of voicelessness so that thousands of voices are being heard.

But that's a lot more complicated than the more simplified narrative of let's have one person speak for Viet.

Vietnamese people, or let's have one movie like Apocalypse Now speak for the entire American perspective.

My view is, look, where we're at in American society has taken us centuries to get here.

Centuries of exploitation and inequity, but also centuries of struggles for freedom and liberation.